Least Terrible

I'm so trendy.

2009-07-29T08:07:00.004-05:00

But in a dry, esoteric way, so no one notices. It's stealthy, is what it is.

"That's kind of a novel idea," I had thought, no-pun-intendedly. "I'll blog my reading of Moby Dick." Then someone told me about that Blogging the Bible project over at Slate. Okay, fine. So at least one other person had a similar idea. Before I did.

And now, not fifteen minutes ago, I see this absolutely charming movie preview.

Apparently, it's based on the true story of a woman who found fame, fortune and happiness blogging her journey through Julia Child's Mastering the Art of French Cooking. This Julie Powell person then turned her blog into a book: My Year of Cooking Dangerously.

Wait ... isn't there also a book called The Year of Living Biblically? Yes, there is. How 'bout that? Seems there's a whole pile of writing out there that takes an old classic to task in one way or another. The Bible gets it twice as much, by my count so far.

Wikipedia calls Julia and Julia "the first major motion picture based on a blog," by the way. Do you think that could happen to me?

Who would play Starbuck?

If I really wanted that kind of publicity and exposure (hee!), I could blog my way through something like 1972's The Joy of Sex. When did I read that ... 1996? I remember the author really dug armpit-hair on women. (Oh, look: that's all that NPR remembers about it, too!)

Okay, no then.

Ishmael and Least Terrible: A Study in Contrasts

2009-07-27T16:55:00.005-05:00

The first sentence of Moby Dick is so famous that just about anyone can quote it, whether or not they know its source. But it is the fourth sentence of the novel that I fell in love with in the beginning:

Whenever I find myself growing grim about the mouth; whenever it is a damp, drizzly November in my soul; whenever I find myself involuntarily pausing before coffin warehouses, and bringing up the rear of every funeral I meet; and especially whenever my hypos get such an upper hand of me, that it requires a strong moral principle to prevent me from deliberately stepping into the street, and methodically knocking people's hats off -- then, I account it high time to get to sea as soon as I can.

But this means that, right from the start, Ishmael and I part ways a bit. Me, I only have the urge to travel when I already feel fairly settled and content with things. ("Travel," here, means a planned trip to somewhere. As opposed to "flee," you understand, which means drive ten hours south and hide at my parents' house. Until I find I need to flee north again.)

I don't know why this is, and this may be the first time I've admitted how much stress the concept of leaving home causes me. I think I'm something of a den animal. And when it comes time to emerge from not only my small condo but my city and my state ... I get more than a little tense.

Maybe it's this: I'm a fairly disorderly person, both at home and at work. I live on the principle that as soon as I find the time, I'm going to get on top of everything. One plans a vacation only when one confesses to spare time. Me, I've already promised that spare time to the gods of orderliness. What vengeance will they wreak if I just go toddling off to hike down into a sandy hole somewhere?

[Digression: Apparently, the Bright Angel Trail -- the trail we took on the way back up -- is one of America's ten most dangerous hikes, according to Backpacker magazine. 'Cause I'm just that bad-ass.]

Never mind that I probably wouldn't have been all that super-productive had I stayed home with a letter-opener and stacks of mail. The point is, leaving town is a guarantee that nothing will "get done" for however long I leave.

Thinking about it another way, though, maybe Ishmael and I aren't all that different. I mean, I certainly recognize all the sentiments in that sentence. Really, all I have to do is switch out the phrase "get to sea" for "get to my house" in order to agree entirely with Melville's narrator.

My way may be less effective, though, as my "hypos" regularly get the upper hand. And I've knocked off my share of hats.

That's MISTER Grand Canyon to you, bitches.

2009-07-25T11:19:00.013-05:00

Or rather, Miz.

(Although David Sedaris points out that in French, a language which bestows gender upon any noun, the Grand Canyon is, "inexplicably," male.)

The point is, once you get there, you realize that no one in the park calls it the Grand Canyon. No, it is always, "Welcome to Grand Canyon National Park," or "You will notice that, here at Grand Canyon," or "The geography of Grand Canyon," etc.

Such a humble canyon. "Let's not make a big deal out of the fact that there is only one me," she says. "Just call me Grand."

Let me tell you, it is no easy task to read seriously in temperatures exceeding one hundred degrees. The hike down was difficult, of course, and hot. But not as bad as it could have been. We had some good cloud cover and even a refreshing shower or two at the beginning. We left early, taking the steep (and infamously shade-and-water-free) South Kaibab Trail, traversing its jaw-droppingly gorgeous ridges in five hours on the nose.

We stayed for two nights at Phantom Ranch; I slept in a bunk in the women's dorm, and ranckle slept in the men's dorm. That middle day -- the "recovery day" was a day I'd planned to use journaling, perhaps writing up a draft of a blog entry. But it was just too hot. Aside from the short hike we took in the morning, you could really only (A) sit in the stream, (B) crouch in your bunk, or (C) sit in the canteen (which had fairly un-sittable cane chairs, truth be told ... my one complaint about the place. It may seem trivial to you, but believe me, when you've hiked to the bottom of Grand Canyon, sitting is very important.) None of these postures are conducive to writing much of anything. (Confession: I didn't even bring the book with me. When every ounce counts, one does not stuff Moby Dick into the backpack alongside all those liters of water.)

Day three was the hike back up. Most people ascend by way of the Bright Angel Trail. It's a few miles longer than S. Kaibab, but less steep, and with shade and water along the way. We made that trek in nine and a half hours, and let me tell you, those last two hours kicked my ever-lovin' ass every step of the way. And then that big-horned sheep came out just to mock me with a condescending look when we stopped at the last water station.

Other odd looks came from hikers coming down, who were toddling a mile or two from the rim while we made our gaspy and stinky way to the top. Their deoderant smelled nice.

So I'm home now, and doing my best to continue M.D., finish Adler, and finally make some headway on that enormous reading list for the fall. Confession the Second: I'm panicking a bit. In all honesty, I don't generally travel that much, and I overestimated my ability to read seriously during flights and car rides and such. Now I'm making myself read fifty pages of Adler a day, hoping that I can continue reading M.D., and worrying about the titles I haven't gotten to yet.

But it was worth it. It was beautiful, and I'm glad to know that I can do it.

And the whiskey sour we had at the canyon rim that night has spurred a minor obsession, for me, with trying to perfect the recipe. What's that? Five more hours until five o'clock? Damn.

"Do you have a flag?"

2009-06-21T09:48:00.010-05:00

Yeah. So that didn't happen, did it? I have no excuse, really. I've been a bit off, lately, when it comes to the kind of reflective reading/thinking I wanted to do. I kept the reading up ... I just wasn't connecting with it. Been feeling a little scattered and distracted.

But now, one week into summer break, the mental gears that seemed to have ground to a halt appear to be budging. (Not fast enough for my liking, given my ponderous to-do list, but still ... a win's a win.) Let's see if I can keep this up and running (at least a little) during my next few trips (Tennessee, then Wisconsin, then ... Grand Canyon! Wooo!)

[Sidenote: The audiobook I've got for the highway portion of my Grand Canyon/Vegas adventure is Stephen King's Desperation, in which folks driving through a desert landscape are terrorized by, I think, the devil? In sheriff form? Says my friend leavesofglass: "I never really understood why people found Stephen King scary until I read the first chapter of that book." I'm a little terrified. Stephen King may be a far cry from Herman Melville, but road trip audiobooks serve a very specific function: to make the time pass quickly. Ten hours feel like five when you're being chased by zombies -- which is why World War Z is the best road trip book ever.]

Where was I? Oh right ... whales. I may say more about this later, but the past ten chapters or so have been just seething with carnage. So many whales chased and obliterated. All described in language ranging from ruthless to piteous. And then I reached chapter 89, "Fast-Fish and Loose-Fish" (my second favorite title, right after "The Town Ho's Story").

I knew that only a tiny sliver of the novel had to do with encountering the white whale himself. But I assumed that the bulk of the book would then contain, you know, character development and stuff. Which it does, of course, but I had expected to be a witness to Ahab's growing obsession and descent into madness, Ishmael's increasing uneasiness with his captain's mania, and all that business. But the fact is, the peg-legged sea captain is referred to as "crazy Ahab" in the very first chapter that introduces him, so there is no "dawning realization" of this.

What's the rest of the book filled with? Detailed descriptions of types of rope. Explaining the function of each piece of equipment on the ship. Who eats with whom and in what order. How to take apart a whale. The difference in appearance between the forehead of a sperm whale, and the forehead of a right whale. And, in chapter 89, laws.

Not so much written laws, as unwritten rules by which whalemen, in competing for their prey, can agree upon who gets what. After all, killing a whale is a dangerous, hours-long, exhausting business. And if the almost-killed whale breaks free, only to be taken, with comparative ease, by a ship that just happens upon the weakened creature ... well, you can imagine the peavishness that could ensue. So. Rules. But only two of them:

I. A Fast-Fish belongs to the party fast to it.
II. A Loose-Fish is fair game for anybody who can soonest catch it.

Of course, there is a lot of wiggle-room, here, in definitions. [I at first wondered if this was where the phrase "playing fast and loose" came from. I was wrong.] For example, one way for a whale to be "fast to" one ship, is for said ship to have ecumbered the whale with a "drugg" attached to a "waif" ... that is, if the whalemen are too busy with one whale to give chase to another convenient prey, they may pierce the second whale with a type of harpoon that both slows the whale (by way of attached wooden blocks, if I understand correctly) and marks it -- the "waif" bears the symbol of that boat.

After explaining this, Ishmael then goes on to entertain himself in his usual way -- that is, by turning this element of whaling into A Metaphor for Life:

"... these two laws touching Fast-Fish and Loose-Fish, I say, will, on reflection, be found the fundamentals of all human jurisprudence ... Is it not a saying in every one's mouth, Possession is half of the law: that is, regardless of how the thing came into possession?"

So many things in this way, he says, are Fast-Fish. Mexico is a Fast-Fish to the United States. India is a Fast-Fish to England. All the money of the populace is a Fast-Fish to the Archbishop.

Oh, Ishmael. Thank you for the excuse to link to one of my favorite Eddie Izzard bits.

Update: Hey, I just realized this is my twentieth post. Yay, little blog!

rissolution

2009-05-17T12:39:00.004-05:00

Though I haven't blogged, lately, I have kept reading ... slowly. The end of the school year approacheth, and I'm trying very hard to stay (mostly) caught up with work. Thoughful reading and blogging suffers at such a time.

Here's the problem, though. Next year, I will be teaching a Great Books class. I'm really excited about this, of course. But my deep, dark secret is that most of the books I'll be teaching? I've never read them. And it's an AP course so there's a lot of them. Like, a LOT, a lot. So I really need to finish this Moby Dick thing in order to dig into the pile of reading that will monopolize my summer. So ...

Rissolution the First: Finish Moby Dick by June 11. That gives me until the end of the semester, plus one week.

Rissolution the Second: Post a list of the Great Books I'll be teaching, and poll my readers -- all three of you (Hi, Aileen! Thanks for commenting!) -- on which one should be the next blog focus. That will be the slow read for the summer, while I try to dash through a bunch of the others. And then maybe when the fall semester starts, I'll go back to blogging Melville (Typee?) or Melville related titles (Ahab's Wife?)

P.S. I googled "rissolution," hoping to link to the Winnie the Pooh passage in which one of the woodland creatures (Owl I thought ... but now I think it may have been Eeyore) pens a "rissolution" bidding Christopher Robin a fond farewell. But Google wouldn't allow for the misspelling and corrected it to "dissolution." That's different, right?

ghost story

2009-04-26T20:51:00.005-05:00

This is going to sound pretty stupid, I guess, but, having never really paid much attention to publication dates and the like (I know. I know.) I'm only just realizing that Moby Dick was published within a few years of another of my favorites, A Tale of Two Cities. Which seems kinda nuts to me. Put the two books together, and suddenly Dickens looks so ... quaint. Old-fashioned. And his novel is the later of the two.

And yet the same ghost haunts both books.

The ghost in question is the infamous Cock-Lane ghost, a visitant who predates both M.D. and A.T.O.T.C by about a century. Haunting the Cock-Lane alleyway near Smithfield market in London, Elizabeth Lynes (or her sister Fanny, depending on which story you read) communicated with residents of an apartment by way of scratches and taps -- earning the ghost the unfortunate nickname, "Scratching Fanny." Her shenanigans almost got her husband charged with murder. That is, until the landlord's daughter was caught with wooden clappers up her dress. (Goodness, what an odd sentence to type.)

Dickens makes use of Scratching Fanny to deepen the satirical tone of his first chapter (that's right, the one beginning, "It was the best of times, it was the worst of times ..."). In setting the historical scene for his tale, Dickens hints that people never seem to change or, more specifically, to wise up, writing:

"Even the Cock-lane ghost had been laid only a round dozen years, after rapping out its messages, as the spirits of this very year last past (supernaturally deficient in originality) rapped out theirs."

Seances were rather fashionable at the time Dickens was writing. He was not a believer.

Melville, though, doesn't poke fun. When Ishmael addresses the reader at the end of chapter 69, his tone is nothing short of ominous:

"Are you a believer in ghosts, my friend? There are other ghosts than the Cock-Lane one, and far deeper men than Doctor Johnson who believe in them."

Chapter 69 is called "The Funeral," and it comes at the end of several chapters detailing the pursuit, slaying and skinning (for lack of a better word) of a sperm whale. Once the layers of blubber have been removed, the pale carcass is cut loose from the Pequod to float in the ocean, beset from below by ravenous sharks and from above by predatory birds. Here is the passage that precedes Ishmael's reference to the Cock-Lane ghost:

"Nor is this the end. Desecrated as the body is, a vengeful ghost survives and hovers over it to scare. Espied by some timid man-of-war or blundering discovery-vessel from afar, when the distance obscuring the swarming fowls, nevertheless still shows the white mass floating in the sun, and the white spray heaving high against it; straightway the whale's unharming corpse, with trembling fingers is set down in the log -- shoals, rocks, and breakers hereabouts: beware! And for years afterwards, perhaps, ships shun the place ..."

To quote John Gardner's Grendel, "I sense some riddle in it."

a note from the dog-walker (sorry ... not about Moby Dick)

2009-04-22T17:28:00.006-05:00

My dog-walker, Denisa, has a dry-erase sheet that she uses to leave me notes, every day, about Starbuck's walk. He's her "companion dog," so she picks him up in the morning and keeps him with her as she makes her rounds. This way, Starbuck has lots of company, and gets to play with lots of dogs.

His favorite regular is a female dog named Shorty ... sadly for Starbuck, he is post-operational, if you know what I mean, so their love remains strictly Platonic.

Here is Denisa's note about today's walk:

"Starbuck had another great day out. He got to see Shorty today and he played with Lucy. We also ran into his big pal Juno, but Starbuck wasn't feeling the love. Juno kept trying to get Shorty's attention (spring fever). Starbuck did not approve, but he was a gentleman."

Alas, poor Starbuck! Spring fever, indeed ...

(Two lightweight posts in a row. My apologies.)

And I thought I was being original

2009-04-16T21:00:00.004-05:00

Remember waaaay back two weeks ago, when I compared chapter 32 ("Cetology") to the Book of Numbers in the Bible?

Here's an interesting cross-reference for you: turns out that David Plotz, over at slate.com is "Blogging the Bible."

Why?

"I want to find out what happens when an ignorant person actually reads the book on which his religion is based."

Here's his intro to/description of the project. Scroll down to find the link to the blog itself.

But since I know you're all dying to read it, here's his take on the Book of Numbers.

Friday, tomorrow. Happy weekend, ya'll!

Ishmael understands you, Bridget Jones

2009-04-11T11:42:00.005-05:00

Over the past week I've experienced a few upheavals and one Western. Appaloosa, the movie in question, stars Ed Harris and the delicious Viggo Mortensen as lawmen who ride into town to rid the benighted populous of Jeremy Irons (at his villainous best). Trouble arrives in the form of Renee Zellweger, who weds Harris only to offer herself to pretty much everyone else any time the poor schlub turns his back.

Of course he catches her at it, and of course he challenges the other fella to pistols at dawn. As Virgil (Harris) and Everett (Mortenson) strap on their guns, Zellweger's character, Allie, enters and asks if they aren't afraid.

Both men seem puzzled by the question, so she has to clarify: "Of getting killed." Everett explains that they don't think about it much, to which Allie responds, "Well, I'm afraid," adding, "but I'm afraid all the time."

At this, Virgil stops what he's doing and gives her a pretty intent look. "Of what?"

"Everything," Allie confesses. But this isn't specific enough for Virgil, so she continues, "Like being alone. Like being with the wrong man. Not having any money, a place to live."

It's not really enough to make fickle Allie a sympathetic character, exactly. But it seems to explain things well enough for Virgil, who responds with, "I'll look out for you."

Trying -- and failing -- to keep it light, Allie asks, "For how long?"

And this is clearly the question that drives each decision her character makes. Even in the final scene she remains a woman who is not entirely convinced that she can stop being afraid.

This morning I read Chapter 60 ("The Line") in which Ishmael describes in great detail what sort of rope is used in the hunting of whales, as well as how it is coiled, where it is stored, and how it is arranged on the four boats that launch from the ship when the crew "lowers" for their prey.

I won't lie: I didn't follow all of it. There are diagrams in the back of my book, but flipping from text to footnotes is always cumbersome and it didn't clarify much. What is clear is the precariousness of a boatman's position as he rows toward a whale, surrounded by a cat's cradle of line that can leap, plunge and pull taut at any time. In fact, Ishmael concedes that "the graceful repose of the line, as it silently serpentines about the oarsmen before being brought into actual play -- this is a thing which carries more of true terror than any other aspect of this dangerous affair."

And then, of course, he takes it a step further -- to a place where Allie French and I are both philosophers:

"But why say more? All are born with halters round their necks; but it is only when caught in the swift, sudden turn of death, that mortals realize the silent, subtle, ever-present perils of life. And if you be a philosopher, though seated in the whale-boat, you would not at heart feel one whit more of terror, than though seated before your evening fire with a poker, and not a harpoon, by your side."

"Ishmael is hilarious:" Least Terrible's attempt to explain the joke

2009-04-05T09:32:00.005-05:00

I think Chapter 48, "The First Lowering," is my favorite chapter yet (excluding the chapters near the beginning which usher in the Ishmael/Queequeg bromance). I mean, it's the Pequod's -- and Ishmael's -- first encounter with actual whales; you see all four whaling boats lowered into the water and launched toward their quarry; you get an energetic description of the first, second and third mates' respective styles of motivating their oarsmen; you get an Ishmael's-eye view of what it's like to row, row, row, not knowing how close you are to the whale until the harpooner stands up and the boat seems to run aground on something; you get the capsizing of Ishmael's boat and the soggy, overnight wait for the Pequod to find him and his companions; and then you get the Pequod materializing out of the fog and crushing Ishmael's little boat as all hands spring into the sea.

And most hilariously, you get Ishmael's pointed questioning about just how standard this experience is. (Actually, this takes place in the next chapter, "The [aforementioned] Hyena." Ishmael had manned Starbuck's boat, after all, and Starbuck has the reputation of being the most conservative and cautious of mariners. Drenched and shivering, Ishmael wrings out his coat, straightens himself, and then, with an air of wounded dignity, formally questions Queequeg and each mate in turn. I particularly like the question he directs to second mate Mr. Stubb, as Stubb placidly smokes his pipe:

"Mr. Stubb, I think I have heard you say that of all whalemen you ever met, our chief mate, Mr. Starbuck, is by far the most careful and prudent. I suppose then, that going plump on a flying whale with your sail set in a foggy squall is the height of a whaleman's discretion?"

Mr. Stubb answers in the affirmative, and Ishmael decides, then and there, to write up his will.

But the whole thing is funny. I'm not doing it justice here ... okay, here's the longish passage that ends with his decision to tidy his affairs:

"Considering, therefore, that squalls and capsizings in the water and consequent bivouacks on the deep, were matters of common occurrence in this kind of life; considering that at the superlatively critical instant of going on to the whale I must resign my life into the hands of him who steered the boat -- oftentimes a fellow who at that very moment is in his impetuousness upon the point of scuttling the craft with his own frantic stampings; considering that the particular disaster to our own particular boat was chiefly to be imputed to Starbuck's driving on to his whale almost in the teeth of a squall, and considering that Starbuck, notwithstanding, was famous for his great heedfulness in the fishery; considering that I belonged to this uncommonly prudent Starbuck's boat; and finally considering in what a devil's chase I was implicated, touching the White Whale: taking all things together, I say, I thought I might as well go below and make a rough draft of my will. 'Queequeg,' said I, 'come along, you shall be my lawyer, executor, and legatee'."

That's all one sentence! Except for the aside to Queequeg, anyhow.

At this point, Melville gives the humor another turn of the screw, though, as Ishmael confesses that sailors really like writing their wills. It's something they do all the time, and Ishmael himself relishes this opportunity to tinker further with his own document. And afterwards, he describes the placid sort of high he achieves upon completion of this task:

"I looked round me tranquilly and contentedly, like a quiet ghost with a clean conscience sitting inside the bars of a snug family vault."

And just because I like it, and because it is a perfect transition to the alliteration post below, I leave you with the sentence which comes next, and which concludes the chapter:

"Now then, thought I, unconsciously rolling up the sleeves of my frock, here goes for a cool, collected dive at death and destruction, and the devil fetch the hindmost."

Alliterative Fun

2009-04-05T09:16:00.005-05:00

I keep meaning to post on Melville's penchant for alliterative phrasing. But as I've said, I'm using an edition that my friend Jeff gave me, and even though he gave it to me, I have the same hesitation to write in it as if it were a loaner. So I'm not writing in it, and every time I see a phrase that I might add to a list compiled for posting purposes, I just try to make a mental note of where it is. Which doesn't work at all in a book this bulky.

So I was thinking maybe that's a stupid, English-teachery thing to post on anyhow, so maybe I won't. And then I hit this sibilant description in Chapter 51, "The Spirit Spout":

"It was while gliding through these latter waters that one serene and moonlight night, when all the waves rolled by like scrolls of silver; and by their soft, suffusing seethings, made what seemed a silvery silence, not a solitude: on such a silent night a silvery jet was seen far in advance of the white bubbles at the bow. Lit up by the moon, it looked celestial; seemed some plumed and glittering god uprising from the sea."

Oo ... pretty.

Thinking of my cousin, who lost his leg last summer

2009-03-31T22:26:00.007-05:00

As the Pequod's second and third mates discuss the wisdom of Ahab manning one of the four whaling boats, Flask asserts that he "don't think it strange." He then clarifies why:

"If his leg were off at the hip, now, that would be a different thing. That would disable him; but he has one knee, and good part of the other left, you know."

Stubb replies:

"I don't know that, my little man; I never yet saw him kneel."

My cousin lost one leg in a car accident last summer. We hoped he'd keep the knee, but that turned out to be impossible. And while he is in regular attendance at church -- not exactly his pattern in youth, by the way -- I think it's fair to say that we have "never yet [seen] him kneel."

He remains, absolutely, my most bad-ass cousin.

"That odd sort of wayward mood ..."

2009-03-29T19:26:00.006-05:00

The first sentence of chapter 49, "The Hyena":

"There are certain queer times and occasions in this strange mixed affair we call life when a man takes this whole universe for a vast practical joke, though the wit thereof he but dimly discerns, and more than suspects that the joke is at nobody's expense but his own."

Apropos of nothing, today is the last day of Spring Break. We had freezing rain and snow. Hilarious? Could be ...

So back to work for me. After tonight, I'll try to post twice a week rather than every day.

The Whiteness of the Poodle

2009-03-28T11:34:00.009-05:00

Q & A with Starbuck:

ISHMAEL: Witness the white bear of the poles, and the white shark of the tropics; what but their smooth, flaky whiteness makes them the transcendent horrors they are?

THE DOGLET: what?

ISHMAEL: Why to the man of untutored ideality, who happens to be but loosely acquainted with the peculiar character of the day, does the bare mention of Whitsuntide marshal in the fancy such long, dreary, speechless processions of slow-pacing pilgrims, down-cast and hooded with new-fallen snow?

THE DOGLET: what?

ISHMAEL: Or why, irrespective of all latitudes and longitudes, does the name of the White Sea exert such a spectralness over the fancy, while that of the Yellow Sea lulls us with mortal thoughts of long lacquered mild afternoons on the waves, followed by the gaudiest and yet sleepiest of sunsets?

THE DOGLET: what?

ISHMAEL: But though without dissent this point be fixed, how is mortal man to account for it?

THE DOGLET: what?

ISHMAEL: ... is it for these reasons that there is such a dumb blankness, full of meaning, in a wide landscape of snows -- a colorless, all-color of atheism from which we shrink?

THE DOGLET: outside outside outside outside outside outside ... what?

ISHMAEL: Wonder ye then at the fiery hunt?

and for all you Freudians out there ...

2009-03-27T13:50:00.005-05:00

Yes I know I didn't explore the Mast-Head image in all of its phallic glory. I know such negligence in dream interpretation is arguably criminal, especially when referencing a text containing such blush-inducing gems as the following:

"There you stand, a hundred feet above the silent decks, striding along the deep, as if the masts were gigantic stilts, while beneath you and between your legs, as it were, swim the hugest monsters of the sea, even as ships once sailed between the boots of the famous Colossus at old Rhodes."

And, yes, I know Freud would direct me to unpack the autoeroticism inherent in all that urgent card-playing.

But you know what? Phooey on that. I need at least a fig leaf's worth of coverage, here, however anonymous my little blog.

The Mast-Head; Queen Mab, Revisited; Warning: Here there be navel-gazing

2009-03-27T11:15:00.012-05:00

I've been giving some thought to the dream I had the other day, and given the subtitle of this blog, it would feel like cheating, somehow, not to write up what I now think that dream means.

It's relevant, first, to comment on chapter 35, "The Mast-Head," which I had read the day before my dream. In this chapter, Ishmael describes the whaleman's duty, when his rotation comes around, to climb up to the mast-head and, for two hours at a stretch, search the horizon for any sign of a whale. Ishmael paints a tranquil picture of "the serenity of those seductive seas in which we Southern fishers mostly float." He then offers a confession:

"Let me make a clean breast of it here, and frankly admit that I kept but sorry guard. With the problem of the universe revolving around me, how could I -- being left completely to myself at such a thought-engendering altitude, -- how could I but lightly hold my obligations to observe all whale-ships' standing orders, 'keep your weather-eye open, and sing out every time.'"

Ishmael concludes his confession by advising "ye ship-owners of Nantucket" to "beware of enlisting in your vigilant fisheries any lad with lean brow and hollow eye; given to unseasonable meditativeness ..."

The mast-head, then, is a place of isolation and contemplation; a place where it is very easy for a person of "unseasonable metitativeness" to "but lightly hold [her] obligations."

So again to my dream: I was walking along a stereotyically suburban road in a stereotypically suburban neighborhood, with the full understanding upon me that neither the road nor the houses were "real" -- rather, they had been manufactured so that the souls entering the afterlife would not find the transition too shocking. I enter a house full of people (in my waking life I recognize them as current students and retired colleagues) who have died at sea, drowned on wrecked whaling ships. These people are all intently playing cards.

It is my job to tell them that they are dead, but I find it difficult to maintain their attention -- even more difficult to convince them that they have died. One girl (a student of mine ... call her Anne) seems to begin to catch on. I ask her, "Can you remember how you came here?" She describes the same road I took to reach the house. I shake my head and explain that road is not real: "What do you remember before that?" She suddenly remembers falling from the mast-head into the ocean, and it dawns on her that she must have died.

Almost immediately, she forgets this revelation and goes back to her card game. I have to start over, uneasily wondering if I am dead as well (after all, I took the same unreal road to get to the house).

In my waking life, Anne is a student who I have consciously thought is a lot like me when I was her age. So Anne who dies when she falls from the mast-head is me. Anne who is dead but thinks she isn't is me. Anne who eternally plays cards in a fake house on a fake street is me.

The house that isn't real and the people who aren't alive is a kind of mast-head itself. It is isolated and the only "obligation" is this meaningless card playing.

I think the mast-head Anne falls from is the life of contemplation and meditation that I so comfortably inhabit. I think the fake house is essentially my place of employment -- a place where I can comfortably teach the same classes and texts every year and feel useful, removed from "real life."

I think I had this dream when I did because I recently ended yet another relationship, and consequently have no other "obligations" outside of my job, which can't really provide all the meaning I need it to. So even at work I'm starting to "but lightly hold my obligations" because they feel increasingly meaningless and unreal, separated as they are from the "real life" that I can't seem to procure.

As grim (and admittedly melodramtic) as it is, I feel I really should conclude this entry with the paragraph that concludes "The Mast-Head":

"There is no life in thee, now, except that rocking life imparted by a gently rolling ship; by her, borrowed from the sea; by the sea, from the inscrutable tides of God. But while this sleep, this dream is on ye, move your foot or hand an inch; slip your hold at all; and your identity comes back in a horror. Over Descartian vortices you hover. And perhaps, at mid-day, in the fairest weather, with one half-throttled shriek you drop through that transparent air into the summer sea, no more to rise for ever. Heed it well, ye Pantheists!"

Pantheists? Whew! For awhile there, I feared he was talking about me ...

Huzza?

2009-03-26T10:44:00.014-05:00

If one were to liken Moby Dick to the Bible, then chapter 32 ("Cetology") would be the book of Numbers. All listing and cataloguing ... though, granted, with more interesting information (whales rather than begats) and snarkier attitude ("You think I made up the events in Typee? Fine. You probably don't believe in whales, either. Let me prove whales to you, then. Jackasses.").

I should take a moment to say that while I'm usually pretty good about putting aside my contemporary/cultural mindset when engaging with older literature -- I once shared a philosophy class with another student who could not discuss Plato's Meno because she couldn't get past how wrong it was for Plato to use a slave (the aforementioned Meno) to prove his point in the first place -- it's still tough going to read such lively and exquisite language about whales and, well, the killing of them.

I was already starting to notice this about myself when I got to Ishmael's description of what he classed as "Duodecimoes," that is, various dolphins and porpoises. In writing about what can only be the exuberant bottle-nosed dolphin, Ishmael playfully renames it the "Huzza Porpoise," and goes on to opine:

" ... he always swims in hilarious shoals, which upon the broad sea keep tossing themselves like caps in a Fourth-of-July crowd. Their appearance is generally hailed with delight by the mariner. Full of fine spirits, they invariably come from the breezy billows to the windward. They are the lads that always live before the wind. They are accounted a lucky omen. If you yourself can withstand three cheers at beholding these vivacious fish, then heaven help ye; the spirit of godly gamesomeness is not in ye."

Grinning broadly at this fantastic description of the frolicsome animal, I painfully barked my intellectual shins against the sentence that immediately follows:

"A well-fed, plump Huzza Porpoise will yield you one good gallon of good oil. But the fine and delicate fluid extracted from his jaws is exceedingly valuable."

Extracted from his jaws? Well that's ... just depressing.

P.S. Thanks, Jeff, for the I'll-just-prove-whales-to-you insight into Melville. Stay tuned, kiddies, for the oh-wait-can-one-really-understand-something-as-awesome-as-a-whale? portion of that insight.

Guest Blogger

2009-03-25T21:37:00.012-05:00

My friend Jeff tried to comment on my post about Bulkington, but technical difficulties prevented it. So here are the excellent thoughts he emailed to me:

The one phrase from this chapter that always sticks with me is: "better it is to perish in that howling infinite, then be ingloriously dashed upon the lee..." In a way, it's very similar to the nod to himself as the "Sub-sub Librarian" in the "Extracts" section at the beginning.

In both you get this idea that Melville knows he's embarking on journey that will be doomed-- I take it as an intellectual journey. In Extracts, you get the melancholoy hope of striking unsplinterable glasses in heaven after all is said and done; in Chapt 23 you get the promise of an apotheosis; each after a setting off to do something where failure is guaranteed.

I think he's encouraging himself and the sympathetic reader to remain open minded in spite of everything-- to avoid allowing oneself the comfort of a stable (closeminded) truth. This view, I think, is best expressed at the end of Chapt 85 (The Fountain). (One of my favorite quotes in the whole book.)

Side notes:

1.Universal coincidence... Chapter 23 and the IChing's Hexagram 23 make similar points.

2. I think that the essence of what he's saying here, that we can't find truth enough to save ourselves but must try anyway is wonderfully echoed by Eliot-- see part II of "East Coker" in his "Four Quartets."

3. My cats are named Queequeg and Tashtego. Did you know?

I did not know. I told Jeff that I had considered "Queequeg" as a name for the doglet, but then remembered an X-Files episode in which a small dog of that name is noshed by an alligator (or something). I just couldn't do it.

Additional X-Files digression: The episode with fluffy little Queequeg also contains this brief exchange (more hilarious "in person" because of the deadpan delivery):

Scully: I called [my father] Ahab and he called me Starbuck. So I named my dog Queequeg. It's funny, I just realised something.

Mulder: It's a bizarre name for a dog, huh?

Scully: No. How much you're like Ahab. You're so... consumed by your personal vengeance against life, whether it be its inherent cruelties or its mysteries, that everything takes on a warped significance to your megalomaniacal cosmology.

Mulder: Scully, are you coming on to me?

Ha! Hee! Oh, god ... *wipes eyes* ... are you coming on to me ... heeee ...

Okay, I'm done now.

Queen Mab

2009-03-25T09:42:00.008-05:00

I'm going to take a break from posting in the morning (she said, posting in the morning) as we finally have a sunny, dog-parkable day I don't want to lose the earlier hours of.

Besides, I had a bad(ish), Moby-Dick-related dream last night:

I had been directed (by God, no less) to walk along a certain street until I got to a certain house full of people. The people in the house were all playing cards. Also, they were all dead -- drowned off of whaling ships -- but didn't know it. My job was to tell them they were dead.

I won't go into much more detail than that (or else I'll spend too much morning typing), except to say that they were very difficult to convince, and, once convinced, they forgot pretty much immediately. It became clear to me that my job was to stay there -- likely forever -- and keep reminding them. At some point, I started wondering if I, myself, were dead.

I woke up exhausted.

So off to the sunny dog park for me and Starbuck! Them dead folks can play all the cards they want.

UPDATE: You can read my interpretation of this dream here.

"That mortally intolerable truth"

2009-03-24T07:16:00.003-05:00

Back-tracking a little, here, to a passage I encountered a few days ago in chapter 23, "The Lee Shore," when Ishmael, "with awe and fearfulness," sees a man named Bulkington aboard the Pequod ... awe and fearfulness because he knows Bulkington has only just returned from a three-year whaling journey and yet cannot, for whatever reason, bear to remain at port:

"... in the port is comfort, safety, hearthstone, supper, warm blankets, friends, all that's kind to our mortalities."

And yet Bulkington flees back to the sea.

And it is in this context that Ishmael (or rather, Melville) drops the first hint of why the whale himself is so heavy with meaning. Directing his rhetorical question to the watery Bulkington, Ishmael asks:

"Glimpses do ye seem to see of that mortally intolerable truth; that all deep, earnest thinking is but the intrepid effort of the soul to keep the open independence of her sea; while the wildest winds of heaven and earth conspire to cast her on the treacherous, slavish shore?"

(Actually, it's more correct to say that this question is directed to the dead whaleman, as Ishmael says "this six-inch chapter is the stoneless grave of Bulkington.")

I was already familiar with the whale-as-soul idea developed in Moby Dick. So my English teacher radar pinged that passage immediately. But this is hardly paint-by-number theme recognition; it raises so many complicated questions.

How to approach this image? It doesn't seem to indicate the soul flees from the self, exactly. I mean, it is "thinking" that is the "effort of the soul to keep ... independence." So the image is not so much that of my soul fleeing understanding by me. Is it? The person doing the "deep, earnest thinking" is complicit with the soul's striving for independence from the "slavish shore," correct?

I certainly prefer to think that my soul and I are in cahoots in a mutually "intrepid effort" against treacherous conspirators. But if so, then why does Melville label this a "mortally intolerable truth?"

Again, it is to the drowned Bulkington that Ishmael directs the question, so perhaps "mortally intolerable" simply means that we cannot entirely know this truth in life. However, I suspect the intolerability has more to do with the "comfort, safety, hearthstone [blah, blah, blah] all that's kind to our mortalities" portion of the passage. These describe "port," and, by extension, "the slavish shore."

So does all "deep, earnest thinking," essential to self-knowledge (or, at least, soul-knowledge) and spiritual freedom, drive us away from "all that's kind to our mortalities"? ("Oh, hell-kite, all?")

Severe. Unless one reads it from a more Buddhist perspective, which would link such portly pleasures (hee!) to the "cravings" that compromise serenity. I wonder what Melville's experience of Buddhism was?

Vindication! then not so much ...

2009-03-23T07:04:00.001-05:00

A brief digression:

In my first year of teaching, I would correct students' writing of "under way" to "under weigh." I started to second-guess myself, though, and asked around -- sure enough, my colleagues insisted the students were spelling it correctly. And when I looked it up, the dictionary defined under way as "no longer in port; moving." So I switched.

In chapter 22, though ("Merry Christmas"), as the Pequod leaves port and Ishmael notes the continued seclusion of Captain Ahab below deck, he comments that "his presence was by no means necessary in getting the ship under weigh."

Ha!

But my feelings of superiority have not lasted long. According to the website World Wide Words, "under weigh" was a mistake from the beginning. It was a Dutch term meaning "on the way," which English-speaking mariners mistook for a reference to "weighing anchor."

Whatevs; a mistake made by Melville, Dickens, and the like is a mistake I'm more than willing to cop to. Though I don't think I'll re-adopt the nautical spelling.

"... a sort of sick, and yet he don't look so."

2009-03-22T12:42:00.002-05:00

Nuts.

You know, when one decides to read any great book for transformative purposes, one hopes to find at least one character to relate to. I thought Ishmael a fine fictional model, for example; barring that, I thought maybe Starbuck; maybe Queequeg; maybe, in moments of sublime rapture, the whale himself.

Not Ahab.

As you likely know (I knew as much, before reading), we don't meet Ahab in the flesh, right away. We hear of him first. And from what I've "heard," so far, Captain Ahab sounds like someone I'd rather dig:

"I know what he is -- a good man -- not a pious, good man, like Bildad, but a swearing good man ... something like me ..."

"Aye, aye, I know that he was never very jolly; and I know that on the passage home, he was a little out of his mind for a spell ..."

"I know, too, that ever since he lost that leg last voyage by that accursed whale, he's been kind of moody -- desperate moody, and savage sometimes; but that will all pass off. And once for all, let me tell thee and assure thee, young man, it's better to sail with a moody good captain than a laughing bad one."

It's true I prefer "swearing good" men to "pious good" ones. And "moody good" sorts to "laughing bad" sorts. And this kind of person does tend to go "a little out of his mind for a spell."

(By the way, I do find it kind of hilarious that insane-with-pain Ahab and his chewed up leg is described here as "kind of moody.")

So to sum up:

Were Captain Ahab to post a personal ad, I'd likely be the gal to answer it.

Nuts.

P.S. If the preceding comments seem lacking in depth or development, I'd like to blame that on the fact that I have given the doglet, for the first time, a raw buffalo bone.

Which bone has Starbuck out of his mind with carnivorous rapture; which bone, also, he shoves about the living room floor, forcing me to get up and reposition the germy thing onto the newspaper tarp I've laid down to prevent the wholesale contamination of my condo.

Loomings

2009-03-21T15:46:00.005-05:00

Thought I'd go with "Call me Ishmael," didn't you?

It seems ridiculous to say it on such a sunny, cool, Saturday afternoon, with my fluffy doglet happily gnawing a gnarly cow tendon on the couch beside me, but I've found myself feeling more than a little desperate, of late, in a meaning-of-life sort of way. And when I read a few selections of Melville's masterpiece for a seminar I took at the Newberry Library, I found myself wanting to abandon all else and give the book my full attention. So that's what I'm doing. Like the ocean for Ishmael, "this is my subsititute for pistol and ball."

Also like Ishmael, I am a teacher, and am finding that on this, the first day of my Spring Break, it is "damp, drizzly November in my soul."

The title of the first chapter is "Loomings," and that s on the end tells us to read it as a noun rather than in the more standard verb form. A looming, then, is "a distorted, threatening appearance of something, as through fog or darkness," according to dictionary.com.

So what is this something that is so threatening, so distorted in appearance, so obscured as if by darkness or fog? I really can't tell you. I enjoy my work, but I find it increasingly wearing. I have very good friends, but I can't always explain myself to them (and feel a little self-indulgent when I try to do so). I've been engaged twice (well, one-and-a-half times), but am currently on my own. I'm young and in good health, but am a hair's breadth closer to forty than to thirty.

For all these reasons (if you can really consider them "reasons" for anything), I have resolved to read Moby Dick in a serious and methodical manner, keeping something of an online reading journal as I go. For these first seven days of Spring Break, my plan is to post daily. After that, who knows? Maybe I'll kill the blog before the great whale kills all hands on the Pequod. Or maybe I'll keep it afloat as I move on to other books.

While I'm reading this one, though, I'll be using this edition of Moby Dick, lent to me by a colleague.